Critic Reviews

It’s a riff or theme-variation on Kieślowski’s A Short Film About Love – with a twist of Hitchcock’s Rear Window – doggedly spinning a spider’s web out of itself. The result is intricate, elaborate, though a little nebulous.

Parallel Tales (Histoires parallèles) begins as an ambitious, metatextual, multicharacter ensemble drama, with various key cast members playing dual roles. But it rambles on too long, losing much of its early charm and focus in a ponderous, undercooked second half.

If the film works at all it is thanks to the exceptional craftsmanship of its camerawork, editing, and acting, under the direction of Asghar Farhadi.

Despite being impressively acted and thematically compelling, it avoids wholehearted recommendation due to its uneven repetition of sequences and ideas that make this feel more lugubrious than cohesive.

There is something watchable about this melodrama in which shocking events force others into being, and in which Huppert is delightfully rude to everyone in a clever way as this literary fraud plays out.

Farhadi tries to be funny and Huppert occasionally makes it work (e.g. using a toaster to light her cigarette), but the comedic element is disparate and half-baked. Yet to Farhadi’s credit, his and Massoumeh Lahidji’s dialogue, which serves as the engine of moral ambiguity that powers the story, has the strength to keep one’s attention for the lengthy runtime if they’re able to invest.

Parallel Tales unspools away from sense and a compelling drive and instead turns out to be a monotonous, limp misfire.

When Parallel Tales shifts tones near the end to unveil an unsettling surprise, the film’s confectionery construction cannot bear the jolt. Like Sylvie, Farhadi wants to mine riveting fiction from the flotsam of the everyday, but his imagination proves to be not as formidable as hers.

Loosely adapting “A Short Film About Love” into a long film about nothing, Asghar Farhadi’s cramped and tedious “Parallel Tales” forfeits the sordid humanity of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s masterpiece in exchange for the soapy meta-fiction of a meandering daydream.

Parallel Tales is exactly as advertised: The central story interweaves the lives of six people in ways that should be a recipe for delicious, chaotic drama. Yet, Farhadi's latest is bogged down by its repetitiveness and refusal to offer anything new to a story about imagination and voyeurism. What we’re left with hangs a little too long onto a thin rope of painful repetition, false hope, and jaded screenwriting.